In his book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, John Allen Paulos uses the term, "innumeracy" in the same way that the term illiteracy is used: to represent an unfamiliarity and ignorance in terms of numbers and mathematics. Besides being well written and entertaining, the book is also informative in explaining common instances of mathematics in everyday life.
Paulos does not confine his discussion only to one aspect of numbers and mathematics. His book is replete with examples of statistics, probability and mathematics. He suggests, for example, that we develop a "safety index" for certain activities or events which would provide the populace as a whole with a quantitative way to evaluate their activities (128). While such an idea may seem farfetched, it illustrates an idea which occurs throughout the book: events can be quantified and evaluated by those who are not innumerate.
Paulos suggests, for example, that people who canceled trips to Europe because of the threat of terrorism, but who continue to drive the highways each day to and from work, are innumerate to the point of making bad decisions. The likelihood of being involved in a terrorist incident is much more remote than the likelihood of being involved in a highway accident. However, the terrorists, activities garner headlines; the many traffic accidents do not.
The problem that Paulos seizes upon is that people who are innumerate, or uncomfortable with numbers, are likely to avoid dealing with them. They work on intuition, which may not be appropriate, or accurate. Yet if these same people would put the rudimentary effort into understanding situations in terms of numbers, the quality of their decisions would be considerably increased.
Gaming examples are used throughout the book, and with good reason: they provide an excellent, real-life example of statistics and probability in action. For example, the likelihood of the b...